's own)
"for three days and three nights." Hard drinking was, we all know, a
necessary accomplishment in the Scotland of those days; and hard
drinking, we must all of us admit, may well have been the one comfort
and resource of a man undergoing the frightful mental and bodily
miseries of those months of lying at bay. But Charles Edward did not
relinquish the habit when he was back again in safety and luxury.
Strangely compounded of an Englishman and a Pole, the Polish element,
the brilliant and light-hearted chivalry, the cheerful and youthfully
wayward heroism which he had inherited from the Sobieskis, seemed to
constitute the whole of Charles Edward's nature when he was young and,
for all his reverses, still hopeful; as he grew older, as deferred
and disappointed hopes, and endured ignominy, made him a middle-aged
man before his time, then also did the other hereditary strain, the
morose obstinacy, the gloomy brutality of James II. and of his father
begin to appear, and gradually obliterated every trace of what had been
the splendour and charm of the Prince Charlie of the '45. Disappointed
of the assistance of France, which had egged him to this great enterprise
only to leave him shamefully in the lurch, Charles Edward had, immediately
upon the peace of Aix la Chapelle, become an embarrassing guest of
Louis XV., and a guest of whom the victorious English were continually
requiring the ignominious dismissal; until, wearied by the indifference
to all hints and orders to free France from his compromising presence,
the Court of Versailles had descended to the incredible baseness of
having the Prince kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound hand and
foot, carried like a thief to the fortress of Vincennes, and then
conducted to the frontier like a suspected though unconvicted swindler,
or other public nuisance.

This indignity, coming close upon the irreparable blow dealt to the
Jacobite cause by the stupid selfishness which impelled Charles Edward's
younger brother to become a Romish priest and a cardinal, appears to
have definitively decided the extraordinary change in the character of
the Young Pretender. During the many years of skulking, often completely
lost to the sight both of Jacobite adherents and of Hanoverian spies,
which followed upon that outrage of the year 1748, the few glimpses
which we obtain of Charles Edward show us only a precociously aged,
brutish and brutal sot, obstinate in disregarding all effo